By Saturday night, John McCain had already experienced a pretty rough day. He’d been trounced by Mike Huckabee in the Kansas caucuses, and then learned he’d been beaten handily in Louisiana GOP primary. In Washington state, which was supposed to be a far easier win for the Arizona senator, McCain was trailing Huckabee for part of the night, but with 87% of the precincts reporting, McCain had a narrow lead, which was less than two percentage points. <\/p>\n
That’s when it got a little odd. Election watchers kept an eye on the results, waiting for additional precincts to report, and wondering whether McCain’s narrow lead would evaporate. The funny thing was, additional precincts didn’t<\/i> report. Despite the narrow margin, and with plenty of votes left to go, the state Republican Party stopped counting and declared McCain the winner.<\/p>\n
As Josh Marshall noted<\/a> yesterday:<\/p>\n Now, I think it would be borderline for a media organization to declare one candidate a winner when the margin separating first and second was 1.8% with 13% of the results still uncounted. But for the officials holding the election to declare the result on that basis is simply bizarre. But that’s what they did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Josh certainly isn’t the only one to find the events unusual. On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Huckabee argued<\/a> that the Washington state caucuses were “still too close to call.” When Russert responded, “Well, the party has declared it over,” Huckabee said, “They have, but there’s some weird things.”<\/p>\n So, weird, in fact, that the Huckabee campaign is sending in the lawyers. Asked for an explanation, state Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser said he just felt confident that the other 13% of the votes didn’t need to be counted. He told reporters, “Maybe it would have been safer if I hadn’t said anything. But it was an exciting and historic day for the state and I thought if I was confident about what the outcome would be I should share that with the people who had gone out to their caucuses.”<\/p>\n It gets worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n It seems that Washington State GOP chair Luke Esser spent most of the day avoiding calls from the Huckabee campaign. And when he finally got back to them he told a lawyer for Huckabee’s campaign that they’d probably count the rest of the votes some time next week. When the lawyer, Lauren Huckabee, the candidate’s daughter-in-law, requested that a Huckabee lawyer be present when the remaining votes were counted, Esser hung up on her. <\/p>\n Before the hang up, Huckabee also asked Esser about the DIY statistical analysis he did to conclude that he should call the race (Esser’s expertise in statistics apparently stems from previous work as a state prosectur and a sports writer). Was there an analysis of what precincts the remaining votes came from? According to Huck campaign manager Ed Rollins, Esser admitted that he didn’t which precincts the remaining votes came from.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nBy yesterday afternoon, the campaign issued a statement<\/a> insisting that it “will be exploring all available legal options regarding the dubious final results for the state of Washington State Republican precinct caucuses.” It added that the campaign is “deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities,” and argued that the state GOP “disenfranchised” more than one in eight Republican voters in Washington.<\/p>\n